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Editor's Introduction, God and Mr. Hitchens

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Editor's Introduction, God and Mr. Hitchens Review of Books on the Book of Mormon 1989–2011 Volume 19 Number 2 Article 2 2007 Editor's Introduction, God and Mr. Hitchens Daniel C. Peterson Follow this and additional works at: https://scholarsarchive.byu.edu/msr BYU ScholarsArchive Citation Peterson, Daniel C. (2007) "Editor's Introduction, God and Mr. Hitchens," Review of Books on the Book of Mormon 1989–2011: Vol. 19 : No. 2 , Article 2. Available at: https://scholarsarchive.byu.edu/msr/vol19/iss2/2 This Front Matter is brought to you for free and open access by the Journals at BYU ScholarsArchive. It has been accepted for inclusion in Review of Books on the Book of Mormon 1989–2011 by an authorized editor of BYU ScholarsArchive. For more information, please contact [email protected], [email protected]. Title Editor’s Introduction: God and Mr. Hitchens Author(s) Daniel C. Peterson Reference FARMS Review 19/2 (2007): xi–xlvi. ISSN 1550-3194 (print), 2156-8049 (online) Abstract Peterson refutes the views of atheist Christopher Hitchens, who takes a stance against religion and vari- ous well-known religious icons. Editor’s Introduction God and Mr. Hitchens Daniel C. Peterson hristopher Hitchens is the fourth of what one might call the Cfour horsemen of the New Atheism—the other three being Sam Harris,1 Richard Dawkins,2 and Daniel Dennett.3 Hitchens is the au­ thor of a recent best seller called god is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything.4 Notice the lowercase god in the title of his book. Subtlety 1. Sam Harris, The End of Faith: Religion, Terror, and the Future of Reason (New York: Norton, 2005). For responses to Harris’s ideology, see Michael D. Jibson, “Imagine,” FARMS Review 18/1 (2006): 233–64; and Louis Midgley, “Knowing Brother Joseph Again,” FARMS Review 18/1 (2006): lxii–lxv, which discusses Harris’s curious fondness, apparently because of his atheism, for a vacuous mysticism. Harris has also published Letter to a Christian Nation (New York: Knopf, 2006); some attention has been given to portions of this screed in FARMS Review 18/2 (2006): 250–51. 2. Richard Dawkins, The God Delusion (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 2006). For a careful examination of this book, see David Grandy, “Ideology in the Guise of Science,” in this number of the Review. 3. Daniel C. Dennett, Breaking the Spell: Religion as a National Phenomenon (New York: Viking, 2006). 4. Christopher Hitchens, god is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything (New York and Boston: Twelve, 2007). For convenience, all subsequent references to this book in the present essay, “God and Mr. Hitchens,” are cited by page number alone. This essay, based on remarks given at the annual symposium of the Foundation for Apologetic Information and Research (FAIR) on 3 August 2007 in Sandy, Utah, derives from a book that William J. Hamblin, of the Department of History at Brigham Young University, and I have been working on, tentatively entitled God and mr. hitchens: Empty Rhetoric, Skewed History, and “the New Atheism.” I have allowed the present essay to retain something of its original oral character. I am grateful to my wife, Deborah, and to my son Stephen for their help in tracking down sources for my response to Christopher Hitchens. xii • The FARMS Review 19/2 (2007) is seldom his strong suit, and that is emblematic of the very serious and mature approach that he takes to the subject. Christopher Hitch­ ens has been a presence in America for quite some time as a television commentator on politics. He is a British writer who recently took U.S. citizenship and has appeared in recent years as a defender of the war in Iraq and, more generally, of the “war against terror.” His stance on these topics makes me nervous because, having now read his book twice and given some thought to his positions, I wonder about his mo­ tivation. Is it really defense of freedom, or is it just disdain for religion, a sentiment that is a very, very powerful force in his life? Notice the subtitle of his book again: How Religion Poisons Everything. In May 2007, when the Reverend Jerry Falwell died, Hitchens be­ came notorious for his comments about Falwell on various television programs and in other venues. What he said in Slate magazine will serve well as an example: The discovery of the carcass of Jerry Falwell on the floor of an obscure office in Virginia has almost zero significance,­ ex cept perhaps for two categories of the species labeled “credu­ lous idiot.” . Like many fanatical preachers, Falwell was especially dis­ gusting in exuding an almost sexless personality while railing from dawn to dusk about the sex lives of others. His obsession with homosexuality was on a par with his lip­smacking evo­ cations of hellfire. From his wobbly base of opportunist fund raising and degree­mill money­spinning in Lynchburg, Va., he set out to puddle his sausage­sized fingers into the intimate arrangements of people who had done no harm. It’s a shame that there is no hell for Falwell to go to, and it’s extraordinary that not even such a scandalous career is enough to shake our dumb addiction to the “faith­based.”5 That is not the usual kind of obituary. 5. Christopher Hitchens, “Faith­Based Fraud,” Slate, 16 May 2007, http://www.slate .com/id/2166337 (accessed 17 January 2008). Introduction • xiii Christopher Hitchens is also famous for despising Billy Graham, Mahatma Gandhi, and (at book length) Mother Teresa of Calcutta.6 On the other hand, he is not a total misanthrope. He has described Vladimir Lenin as a great man, and he still reveres Leon Trotsky (pp. 151–53). However, his god is Not Great is explicitly contemptuous of religious believers, at excruciating length and in considerable detail. He despises Jerry Falwell for his alleged crimes but, again, admires Trotsky, who is famous for saying, among other things, that we need to get beyond “the Church babble about the sanctity of human life,”7 an idea that Trotsky put into force, serving, with Lenin, as the co­ architect of the Gulag in the Soviet Union, leading to the deaths of potentially as many as 40 million people. Hitchens on the Mormons One of the exhibits in Hitchens’s case against religion is Mormon­ ism. He has a short and poorly informed section about Mormonism in his book in which he describes Mormonism—and this language is fairly typical of the way he approaches religion altogether—as a “ri­ diculous cult” (p. 161). He further states that “the actual story of the imposture is almost embarrassing to read, and almost embarrassingly easy to uncover” (p. 162). He has personally gone to a great deal of effort to uncover it by studying the work of Fawn Brodie. The story, Hitchens says, “has been best told by Dr. Fawn Brodie, whose 1945 book No Man Knows My History was a good­faith attempt by a pro­ fessional historian to put the kindest possible interpretation on the relevant ‘events’ ” (p. 162). This is typical of his approach. Fawn Brodie becomes Dr. Fawn Brodie, even though, in fact, she never had a doc­ torate. And he does this sort of thing consistently. The most obscure atheist emerges as “the great so­and­so,” “the illustrious so­and­so,” whereas the greatest theists—Thomas Aquinas, St. Augustine—are all depicted, essentially, as completely clueless idiots. I am fond in 6. Christopher Hitchens, The Missionary Position: Mother Teresa in Theory and Practice (New York: Verso, 1995). 7. Quoted in Erik Durschmied, Blood of Revolution: From the Reign of Terror to the Rise of Khomeini (New York: Arcade, 2002), 170. xiv • The FARMS Review 19/2 (2007) particular of his contrasting “Dr. Fawn Brodie,” who did not have a doctorate, with “William Albright of Baltimore” (p. 103), who is con­ sidered by many to be the leading archaeologist and the leading Old Testament scholar of the twentieth century. “William Albright of Bal­ timore” happens to have taught at Johns Hopkins University, where he founded that university’s notable tradition of biblical studies and archaeology. But that does not count, because it appears he was some sort of believer. Mormonism shows “what happens when a plain racket turns into a serious religion before our eyes” (p. 165). Joseph Smith was a “gifted opportunist” whose “cleverness was to . unite cupidity with half­ baked anthropology” (pp. 161, 162). Hitchens also claims that Joseph Smith modeled himself on Muhammad (p. 161). (I find that last as­ sertion interesting because I have recently published a biography on Muhammad and had not noticed any such connection.)8 Here is an­ other Hitchens comment I liked: “Smith refused to show the golden plates to anybody, claiming that for other eyes to view them would mean death” (p. 163). He makes no mention of the Witnesses, perhaps because he does not know about them. And further: the Book of Mor­ mon is “a piece of vulgar fabrication” (p. 166). But you learn a lot about the Book of Mormon from his book. You learn, for example, about “Nephi, the son of Lephi [sic]” and “the made­up battle of ‘Cumora’ [sic].” Such comments represent the me­ ticulous research found all the way through Hitchens’s book, which is why I can safely use his approach to Mormonism as an illustration, in microcosm, of the way he generally approaches the whole issue of re­ ligion. Speaking of the policy on priesthood and blacks and the Mor­ mons, Hitchens informs his readers that Mormon leaders “had still another ‘revelation’ and, more or less in time for the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1965 [sic], had it divinely disclosed to them that black people were human after all” (p.
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